


moonlight and love songs never out of date

by anamnesisUnending



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Buddy and Vespa are in sappy gay love and everything will be okay eventually, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Juno and Vespa get along but sometimes their respective traumas do not, Memory Loss, Podcast WLW Week, The Family That Steals Together Heals Together, also I heard something about a, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-11 23:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18434543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamnesisUnending/pseuds/anamnesisUnending
Summary: For all the things Buddy and Vespa lost beneath the Martian sun, they found each other again.--Memories, lost things, and a morning gone awry. Apologies, emotional conversations, and ridiculous soap operas.





	moonlight and love songs never out of date

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from As Time Goes By, because you know how I love a good casablanca reference

Sleep is hard to come by, these days. Between Vespa’s nightmares and the near-constant dislocations and subluxations of Buddy’s joints—lingering effects of long-term radiation poisoning—they steal sleep in troubled and irregular snatches of hours, curled up in their two beds, one room. Years ago—in another life, really—they used to fall asleep side by side, and wake up with all the blankets in a tangle on Vespa’s side of the bed. Vespa always slept with a knife under her pillow, that hasn’t changed, but these days she wakes up reaching for it, kicking and thrashing, often enough that it’s safer just to sleep apart. Vespa still steals most of the blankets, though.

It’s hardly ideal, often miserable, but more often than not their odd schedule offers them this: the rare quiet of the early mornings. This gentle solitude when their cramped and clamorous ship becomes still and serene, and for a few brief hours they’re the only people in the whole galaxy as it spills out before them, pale glittering stars littering the dark, just outside the thick plastic of their kitchen window.

Buddy puts on a pot of tea and hums old songs from times gone by. In an hour or so, Vespa might make breakfast, but for now they sit together at the table, and she eases the tangles from Buddy’s hair and as much of the tension as she can from her shoulders, and they make up for lost time, wrapped in each other’s arms.

It’s one of the few times Buddy keeps her hair out of her face, pulls it back and lets her warm smile twist her withered grey skin, meets Vespa’s eyes with her own half-mechanical gaze. There’s nothing Vespa could ever love more than those eyes, than that smile, than their love made new in the foreign contours of Buddy’s face.

And now she’s up pouring two mugs of tea, and singing some familiar tune; Vespa can almost fall into the harmony of it, but can’t remember the words, and Buddy breaks it off to say, “Remember that old grand piano we used to have? We stole it from some heiress’s fifth vacation home, and you said we’d probably have to cut it in half to get it into the ship.”

She looks back, when Vespa doesn’t answer. Vespa doesn’t let her face fall the way she feels she’d like to. She only shakes her head and furrows her brow as she searches in vain for the memory, and Buddy sets a mug down in front of her and says, so carelessly, “That’s alright. I doubt I’d be able to play it like I used to anyway.”

She leans against the table and drums her fingers on it to hear the soft clatter of her rings against it, elegant silver designs that cover her fingers and double as splints to keep them from hyperextending. Soon she’s got another song in her head, but Vespa’s still caught on the one she can’t remember, her forehead creasing deeper with the effort of drawing it back. Buddy notices when her teeth start to worry at her already chapped lips, and she lifts Vespa’s chin to meet her eyes.

“What is it, dearest?”

“Nothing,” Vespa brushes it off quickly, feels the irritation creeping into her voice already. “Just… what was that song you were singing?”

Buddy sings another bar of it, as if in question, and Vespa nods. “That one.”

“Just an old song we liked, popular a few decades before we were born, I think. You know,” she says with a grin, “it used to come up on the music machines in Cerberus fairly often, and there was one time when you heard it on a crowded street, and dragged me sprinting around the block, sticking our noses into every establishment with its doors open until we found where it was playing from.”

Buddy pulls the song up on her comms and lets it spill out into the air, smile shining with that bright radiance it always has as she sinks into the memory. This kind of memory, this bright joy, this song, is meant to be shared, but Vespa sits dumbstruck with her forgotten verses, locked out of her own past. She wishes she could disappear before Buddy realizes her shame.

Buddy looks back, though, at Vespa’s downcast eyes, the red flush to her cheeks, and it hurts more than forgetting, to see the way Buddy’s smile crumbles into concern.

“Darling?” she says.

Vespa just shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I just…”

“You’ve nothing to apologize for,” she says softly.

Vespa pulls back when Buddy reaches for her hand. Rises from her chair and sets about pacing the room, tugging a hand through her hair and coming up with bright green strands between her fingers.

“Vespa?”

She clenches her fist, feels her nails bite into her palm. “I don’t remember.”

“That’s alright, Vespa, it doesn’t matter now,” Buddy says, rushing to soothe her agitation. “The past is behind us, and we’re different people now, we don’t have to pretend that nothing’s changed. I made you a promise, when we found each other again, I—”

“You don’t get it,” Vespa snaps, and keeps moving, never turning to look back at Buddy. “I don’t remember. Any of it. I don’t remember that stupid soap opera we used to watch, or the heist we pulled on Enceladus, or your old friend you wanted to visit on whatever planet they’re from. I don’t remember any of the things I _want_ to remember. And the first ten years we were apart are so full of missing pieces I don’t know where I was half the time, or what I was doing, and I’m so fucking scared that’s gonna come back to bite me, and sometimes it feels like all I have is every awful thing I went through in the Cerberus Province that I _wish_ I could forget, but I _can’t_ , and I can’t even sleep because of it, and—” she breaks off with a frustrated shout.

Buddy sits quietly, hands folded on the table, and waits for Vespa to come back to her.

When Vespa turns around, she’s wiping tears from her eyes, and she says, “It’s not alright. And I don’t even know if I did anything to deserve it, because if I did I forgot that too.”

“ _Never_ ,” Buddy says unyieldingly. “You know you shouldn’t have had to go through any of that, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there when you came looking for me. I’ll never let that happen to you again.”

Vespa picks up her mug of tea and stares into the steaming liquid, watches it ripple as her hands shake. She parts her lips, trying to formulate any kind of response to Buddy’s words.

And then the kitchen door slides open.

Vespa startles, burning her hands as the mug is upended and spills, all over her and her clothes and the floor. It slips from her hands and shatters, cataclysmically loud, compounded by her cursing as she whirls around to fix whoever disrupted them with a venomous glare.

Juno looks bewildered, standing in the doorway in slippers and pajama pants, as if he wasn’t really awake until now, and a doe-eyed panic, almost _terror_ seizes him as he meets Vespa’s eyes, and…

Vespa likes Juno. He’s sharp with his wit and his tongue, gruff, rough edges, and beneath that all a self-sacrificing devotion to anyone and anything he could see some good in. He could pretend to hide his heart all he wanted, but Vespa had seen it the second he threw himself on her knife instead of killing her.

But this morning, when Vespa looks at him, she sees fear first, and in that fear the face of every Board of Fresh Starts executive who’d ever set foot in Cerberus to see her. She sees the fear that stared back every time she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, every time she dared lash out at the injustice of it, every time she was a little too careless in mentioning a hallucination. All the execs in crisp suits who’d never stand under the Martian sun unshielded, who’d never know a fraction of what they put her through, had wielded their fear like a weapon against her. They’d controlled her and hurt her and threatened her, had her locked away, left her isolated and restrained in empty rooms for hours, just so that they’d feel _safe._ She sees fear, and in fear she sees the face of everyone who kept her captive with a cuff on her wrist and a cure in her blood.

She snarls, “ _Get the hell away from me.”_

The terror doesn’t leave his face, and his eyes only widen at her words, and he turns on his heel and runs. Vespa’s too relieved by his absence to be concerned for him, but some part of her knows that this is wrong, that the Juno she knows—if she knows him at all—wouldn’t just take her words and leave without putting up a fight.

“ _Vespa,_ ” Buddy says sharply, startled by her outburst.

Vespa stares at the open doorway for a moment, and her gaze still locked on its emptiness, says, “You should go too. I just… need a second to myself,” her voice small and breaking.

She finds a dish towel and starts mopping up the spilled tea, picking up the broken shards of the mug. She doesn’t turn to see the look on Buddy’s face as she leaves.

*

She pulls herself together, eventually. She’s had plenty of practice. Plenty of help, too.

She keeps a greenhouse on the ship, overflowing with plants she could use to make poisons and antidotes, a deadly little sanctuary, and she goes there when she needs to be alone. She and Buddy and Jet had set it up, made a day of it, really, buying pots and soil, planting seeds and sprouts, putting together the shelves they were organized on. It helps to have something to take care of, to build a routine around, or at least Jet had said as much. Vespa finds she can’t really argue with that.

Mostly, it’s just grounding, comforting. It’s so different from the dry, dusty red she was surrounded by in Cerberus; it smells like rain on half-remembered planets, and it’s green, and alive, and the closest she ever feels to another life, be it the past she left behind or the future she’s building.

She pulls on a pair of gardening gloves, thick enough to protect her hands from the thorns and spines on some of her more lethal plants, and long enough to cover her wrist, and the scars from when her blood filtration bracelet used to chafe at her skin, when she would tug at it, scraping the skin underneath, and dream of one being able to take it off, see its shining metal crushed under her heel, twisted and broken in the dirt.

That’s not where she wants to be right now. She focuses on watering plants and trimming dead leaves, simple tasks, and the smell of petrichor, and the soft dirt beneath her fingertips. She strips off the gloves once she’s dealt with the poisonous ones, and moves instead to her favorite part of the garden, filled with fruit bushes. It had been Buddy’s idea, a luxury of the sort Vespa hadn’t considered in years. There’s a good collection of ripe strawberries, now, and she can’t resist eating one directly off the vine.

This will be a memory too, someday. Someday she’ll look back on the past and she won’t have only hurt to remind her who she is. But today she’s still reckoning with the pains of her past, and she’s not the only one. Buddy’s past is so inextricably tangled up in Vespa’s lost memories, and Juno’s mired in his own history, laid bare on his face this morning, and both of them linger with her, as she sits in the garden, alone but not alone.

*

A little later, she finds herself in Rita’s room. It’s a headache of too much, garish colors and tacky decorations and posters for every movie in the galaxy. Vespa doubts there’s a centimeter of blank space on her walls. The room fits its occupant perfectly, she thinks with a grimace.

Rita’s chattering and clattering away on her keyboard. Vespa’s not tuned out, necessarily, but it’s not really possible to follow what she’s saying most of the time. Right now, she’s going on about “the fifteenth best late night talk show medical drama of all time,” which is allegedly a spin-off of the stream Vespa’s actually here for.

“Oh my god, and didn’t you love in season eighteen, when—”

“No spoilers,” Vespa interrupts, not because she actually cares, but because it’s probably the only way to get Rita to stop talking.

Rita gives a theatrical gasp and nods severely. “Okay Ms. Vespa. But as soon as you get caught up we _have_ to talk about the season twenty-three finale.”

“Sure,” Vespa says, and returns Rita’s radiant grin with a polite half-smile.

Rita keeps typing for a moment longer, then hands Vespa a tiny flash drive. “Here ya go! All sixty-six seasons of Kepler Terra, M.D. Oh, Ms. Vespa I can’t _wait_ for you to get caught up, we’re gonna have _so much fun!_ We should watch it together— _no!_ we should get the whole ship to watch it together, and we can have a movie night and have lots of snacks and everything, don’t you think?”

Rita grasps Vespa’s hand with crushing enthusiasm. Vespa gingerly tries to free herself from her grip, tries not to let her anxious discomfort show on her face.

“I’d… really rather not,” she says, escaping to the doorway. “Thanks, Rita. I’ll see how far I get with it.”

“Oh,” Rita says, and the disappointment in her voice nearly makes Vespa wince. She rallies quickly, though, and says, “Well that’s okay! And any time you wanna stop by we can talk or paint each other’s nails, or I could show you how to de-encrypt the secret extra bonus footage from all your favorite streams.”

“Sure,” Vespa says, baring her teeth in an awkward grin, one hand already on the door handle. Then she frowns and says, “And hey, next time you see Juno, could you let him know I’m sorry about this morning?”

Rita tilts her head and folds her arms and peers over the rims of her glasses with a look that shouldn’t be anywhere near as intimidating as it is, on her soft, friendly face. “Don’t you think you should apologize to Mr. Steel yourself?”

Vespa feels herself tense with frustration, but she knows it’s her own fault, not Rita’s. She grits her teeth. “Sure.”

She turns to open the door and sees Juno’s closed door just across the hall. She glances back at Rita, who… tries to raise an eyebrow at her? She shuts Rita’s door behind her.

And she knocks on Juno’s.

“What is it?” He asks, his voice rough with the tired wariness he always carries. He pulls the door open and freezes, still behind it, when he sees that it’s Vespa.

“I just wanna talk,” she says.

His eyes are narrowed, and he keeps his body behind the door as if it shields him from her.

“To apologize,” she clarifies quietly, and then he just looks… confused. “Is it okay if I come in?”

He opens the door to let her through, though he stays behind its protection as she passes through the doorway. He leaves it just barely ajar behind them, his hand still on the handle. Vespa stands in the middle of the room, not wanting to make herself at home in a space that isn’t hers.

“So?” he asks.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you.”

He shrugs, more with nervousness than with the indifference the gesture tries to portray. “Whatever. We’ve all got shit to work through.”

“Yeah,” Vespa says, “And working through it is my business, not something I should take out on you. Or anyone.”

“Okay, fine, apology accepted, are we done here?” he says brusquely.

She wants to say yes, to leave and forget about all of this, but if she leaves this unresolved she won’t get that look on his face out of her head, the panic in his eyes. She bites at the inside of her cheek, trying to figure out the right words to say.

Juno folds his arms over his chest defensively and carries on for her. “Look, it’s not like waking up to someone breaking dishes and screaming at me is exactly new, you know? If you wanna hear my sob story so you can walk on eggshells around it, fine, as long as you don’t keep reminding me of it.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” she says softly. “You deserve better than me dredging up all the shit you’ve gone through, and you sure as hell deserved better than having to go through it all in the first place. You should be able to feel safe in your own home. I’m sorry for making you feel like you’re not safe in this one.”

Juno blinks, like he’s not sure what to do with that, and looks down at his feet as he says, “Thanks. It’s not a big deal, really, I’m… trying to move past it.”

Vespa’s lips curve into a sympathetic approximation of a smile. “How’s that going for you?” she says, with just a hint of irony, and the knowledge that neither of them ever really will.

Juno snorts. He crosses the room to sit down on his bed, and the tension between the two of them eases, just a bit. Vespa looks at the empty space next to him, but doesn’t move.

He says, “I haven’t lived in that house in over twenty years. She’s been dead almost as long. Could be going a hell of a lot better.” He lies back against the mattress, arms folded behind his head. His shirt rides up, just enough that Vespa can see a peek of the scar she gave him, months ago, and she feels the blood drain from her face at the sight of it.

Juno says, “Could be going a hell of a lot worse, too.”

Vespa grunts in acknowledgement.

He looks up and meets her eyes, and she shifts a little awkwardly before moving to sit next to him on the bed.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot more than I ever used to. Ever since Buddy found me, really, and it sucks, but I think it helps too. I don’t… blame myself like I used to. Should probably thank her for that; I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten here if I hadn’t met her.” He pauses for a moment, then says, “I’d also be super dead if she hadn’t had Jet drag my ass out of the desert, so there’s that too.”

She laughs at that, and it makes him crack a smile too. And she looks down at that raised sliver of scar tissue, the newest of many marking him, and thinks she barely knows him now, but even so he’s not the stranger she gave that wound to. He hasn’t been in a long time, not since he stayed, since he passed her that briefcase in the dark Board of Fresh Starts office room.

“Hey, J, I don’t think I ever really thanked you,” she starts.

Juno cocks his head and looks at her strangely. “I have a friend back in Hyperion who calls me that,” he says, his voice wistful. Then, after a moment, “Thanked me for what?”

Vespa nearly scoffs, but thinks better of it. “Back in Cerberus,” she explains. “You stuck around. You helped save me, even after I— you know.” 

“Stabbed me?”

“Yeah. That,” she says. “But seriously, people don’t just do that. Help people like that. I don’t get why you did it, but I’m grateful. I don’t think I’d be here if you hadn’t.”

Juno shrugs. “Sure, uh. No problem,” he says bashfully. It brings a lopsided smile to her face.

His hand is on the bed, right next to hers, and she clasps it in her own for a second, then gets up to leave. “I’ll see you around, J.”

“Got somewhere to be?” he asks.

Her hand goes to the flash drive in her pocket. “Yeah. I do.”

*

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” Vespa says when she finds Buddy again in their room. Buddy’s sprawled out across her mattress among a mountainous collection of pillows, dressed in a soft silk dressing gown. She looks up when Vespa comes in.

“Oh?” she says, her uncovered eye sparkling warmly.

“Close your eyes.” Behind her back, Vespa holds a bowl of fresh strawberries, picked from the greenhouse and neatly sliced. She climbs onto the bed with Buddy, who laughs and lifts her head expectantly as the pillows shift under Vespa’s weight. Vespa kneels over her and places a strawberry against her lips, revels in the way she grins and the kiss she presses against Vespa’s fingertips.

She chews, and swallows, and says, “I take it the garden is coming up nicely?”

Vespa pops a strawberry into her own mouth and nods. “I picked all the ones that were ripe. We should have about twice as many more in a couple days.”

Buddy sighs happily and pulls Vespa down to lay next to her, and Vespa laughs as she sinks into the plush pile of pillows.

“I talked to Juno, too,” she says.

Buddy hums curiously. “How is our dear detective?”

Vespa shrugs. “The usual. Grumpy. Cagey. A real sweetheart,” she says teasingly.

“Oh, isn’t he?” Buddy agrees.

“We talked some stuff out. It helped, I think,” Vespa says.

“Good,” Buddy says. “I love you both dearly; I’d hate to see you fight.”

“Yeah, well, you know what they say.” Vespa snorts at her own joke before finishing it, “The family that steals together, heals together.”

Buddy rolls her eyes and giggles. “I hope you still think that’s funny when I have it made into a lovely wall decoration to hang in our meeting room.”

Vespa groans and shoves her gently. “Don’t you dare. Hey, I’ve got another surprise, if you’re up for it,” she says. “Remember that stupid soap opera we used to watch?”

*

To hear Rita tell it, Kepler Terra, M.D. is the eleventh greatest medical drama ever to grace the galaxy’s airwaves. To hear Buddy tell it, it’s a dreadful soap opera they used to keep up with in their twenties, and every Thursday night Vespa would mine the new episode for medical inaccuracies while they laughed themselves to tears.

Halfway through the first episode, Vespa’s already deeply engrossed. It’s… not exactly like watching a trainwreck, but she can’t come up with any other comparison. Kepler’s uncle dies on the operating table in episode one, and by the middle of the second episode he’s revealed to be alive when he lands a spaceship on the roof of the hospital to introduce the staff to his new wife. By the third episode, Kepler’s coworker and love interest is revealed to be involved in an interstellar cat-smuggling ring headed by Kepler’s sister. She dreads to see the mid-season finale, though in her eyes the medical offenses are almost worse than the plot. She keeps up a running commentary throughout.

“Okay, I know this is fiction but please don’t tell me that’s actually how you think a defibrillator works.”

*

“Fuck no, put some fucking gloves on, this is a _surgery_ , what are you— oh my god.”

*

“Oh my god that’s not even where that bone _is._ ”

*

“Yeah, of course, you can _totally_ reverse the effects of stage three spaghettification after a patient falls into a black hole. Miracles of modern medicine.”

*

“This is horrible. I swear, no one on this stupid show has actually been through med school. Is that going to be the next ridiculous plot twist? That no one here actually knows how to practice medicine?”

*

They’ve barely started the sixth episode when it gets so ridiculous that they have to pause it, because they can’t hear the dialogue over their laughter. Buddy had been resting her head in Vespa’s lap, up until the point that Vespa had doubled over with laughter, face pressed into a pillow. She pushes herself back up, shaky with joy, and goes to gather Buddy back into her arms.

But Vespa looks to Buddy and sees her scrubbing away tears from her organic eye, and she knows from the shape of Buddy’s breathing that they’re not from laughing. She freezes, mouth still stretched tight around a grin, and feels the joy fall from it as she wraps her arms around Buddy’s shoulders.

“What’s wrong, Bud?” she murmurs.

“Nothing,” Buddy says hurriedly, her voice bright and breaking. “Don’t worry, darling, please. I just haven’t seen you laugh like that in a long time.”

“Yeah,” Vespa says. “Yeah I know.” She holds Buddy close, kisses the top of her head, and closes her eyes against the tears that threaten her as well. After a long moment like that, she says, “I’m sorry I’m not who I used to be. I know you miss her.”

At that, Buddy practically wrenches herself from Vespa’s embrace, looks up at her with heartbroken eyes. She cradles her hand against Vespa’s cheek, and pulls her down to join their lips together, as if she could erase the words from her mouth with a kiss.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, breathlessly, when she pulls away. “How could I miss you when you’re right here?”

Vespa just looks away. “Come on, you know I’m more of a neurotic mess now than I ever was.”

“I never wish you were the person you used to be,” she insists. “We’ve both changed, Vespa. I used to think we were invincible, that it could be just you and I against the world, forever. But I’m so tired of that fight. It means so much to me that we have a home and a family here. That never would have happened without you.”

“God, you’re such a sap.” Vespa’s tone is gruff but she can’t hide her affection. She thinks, quietly, for a long time, then says more seriously, “I love you. I wouldn’t walk away from you—from _us_ —for anything in the galaxy. But sometimes I feel like I don’t belong in my own life, like everything you and I have is attached to a person I don’t know how to be anymore, and everything that’s still me is what I’m trying to leave behind. And I don’t know what to do with that.”

Buddy runs her fingers through Vespa’s hair soothingly. “I know. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for you, and I’m sorry if I’ve made it even harder.”

Vespa shakes her head. “I like hearing about all the things we used to do together. Just wish I could remember them with you.”

She leans her head into Buddy’s shoulder, holds her, tries not to cling with desperation to her, because they’re safe and they won’t lose each other again. They share a long moment, steadying in the warmth between them.

“You know,” Buddy finally says, quiet, and hesitating in that way she so rarely does, “I don’t like to talk about the past fifteen years. I spent all that time hoping you’d find your way back to me, and believing you wouldn’t, and you know the toll that takes on someone. So I can’t say I know what it’s like to forget, but…”

“But we both lost each other. We both changed because of that.”

Buddy nods. “It’s easier for me to pretend things can go back to how they were before. That doesn’t mean I wish we were the people we were twenty years ago. It only means we’re still figuring out the people we are now.”

Vespa nestles down into the pillows, arms still looped around Buddy’s waist. “Thanks, Bud,” she murmurs. As Buddy curls up with her, she says, “I’m glad we’ve grown up, at least. Being young and reckless really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Buddy laughs. “No, now we’re just old and reckless.”

“Much better,” Vespa says.

“Oh, surely,” Buddy grins, and hits play on their soap opera.


End file.
